As more than 26,000 Northern California healthcare professionals prepare to strike at 34 medical centers, including several in the Bay Area, officials at the largest health organizations affected say patient services will continue with minimal interruption. The strike is planned for 7 a.m. today through 7 a.m. Friday, with picket lines and rallies scheduled at affected facilities throughout the day. The California Nurses Association and National Union of Healthcare Workers are leading the strike against Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health, organizations with which the unions have contract disputes. Kaiser Permanente hospitals rescheduled elective surgeries planned for today and Sutter Health contracted temporary nursing agencies to replace striking workers, but medical centers run by both organizations will remain open through the strike. "Our patients can be confident they will be safe and well cared for," said Deborah Goodin, vice president of human resources for Mills-Peninsula Medical Center, a Sutter facility. "We will get through the next five days just supporting the community as we're committed to doing."
New technologies are flooding into the healthcare world, but the industry is not adequately prepared to protect patients from data breaches, according to a report published on Thursday. A vast majority of hospitals, doctors, pharmacies and insurers are eager to adapt to increasingly digital patient data. However, less than half are addressing implications for privacy and security, a survey of healthcare industry executives by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP found. PwC's Health Research Institute interviewed 600 executives in the spring of this year and also found that less than half of their companies have addressed issues related to the use of mobile devices. Less than a quarter have addressed implications of social media. "The health IT and new uses of health information are changing quickly and the privacy and security sometimes may not be moving in step," said Jim Koenig, a PwC director who is among the contributors to the report.
Carolyn Bucksbaum still bristles about an arrogant physician who brusquely dismissed her intuition about her ailment decades ago. It turned out she was right. The physician was wrong. "We all make mistakes," she said. "But he never even apologized." Years later, Ms. Bucksbaum and her husband, Matthew, would come under the care of Mark Siegler, MD, at the University of Chicago Medical Center, a doctor they found compassionate and humble. "He goes by Mark," Ms. Bucksbaum noted approvingly, "not 'Doctor.'" Medical students, they thought, could do well to emulate him. Now, the Bucksbaums are donating $42 million to the university to create an institute devoted to improving medical students' handling of the doctor-patient relationship. The Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence, to be announced Thursday, will be led by Siegler. "To care for a patient," Dr. Siegler said, "you have to care about a patient." If it seems like a lot of money for teaching good bedside manners, researchers point to many studies that indicate a good rapport between doctors and patients strongly correlates with favorable health outcomes.
The financial losses are starting to pile up for Clark County's public hospital. University Medical Center posted an operating loss last year that exceeded $70 million, nearly 3 percent more than last year's loss. The hospital has tried for years to minimize the losses but there's very little hope UMC can be back in the black anytime soon. Three years of budget shortfalls has meant layoffs and paycuts. The hospital's CEO says there won't be anymore cuts, so now the focus is filling that $70 million hole. Being the largest public hospital in the state, UMC has to take every patient whether they can pay or not. Last year the hospital ate $250 million in unpaid bills.
In Stage 1 of Meaningful Use, hospitals must show that their staffs used computerized physician order entry to order medications for at least 30% of patients. According to a new Health Affairs study, that threshold is "probably too low" to reduce the mortality rate of patients suffering from heart attacks, heart failure, or pneumonia by reducing medication errors and improving patient safety. If the threshold were raised to 60% and then to 80% of patients--as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expects will happen in stages 2 and 3 of Meaningful Use--the death rate could be cut significantly, the researchers said. The co-authors of the study reached this conclusion by applying statistical modeling to American Hospital Association data on electronic medication ordering and CMS data on the mortality rates of Medicare patients.
The family of Edward Harrigan -- a patient who died at Tobey Hospital in Wareham after no one responded to warnings on his cardiac monitor -- filed a federal lawsuit against the hospital and a nurse this week. Harrigan, 87, was a patient at the hospital in September 2008. His electrocardiogram displayed a "flat line" for more than two hours because the battery in his heart monitor had died, but no one changed the battery, according to state Department of Public Health investigators. During that time, his heart stopped. Because the monitor was not working, no alarm sounded to alert staff to his cardiac arrest. They later found him unresponsive and without a pulse. The family's attorney said yesterday that Harrigan's death was caused by alarm fatigue -- when nurses become desensitized to monitor alarms, both audible and visual.